Debutante Graffiti II & III (diptych), mixed media on canvas, 60x48 inches
-Christopher, we'd love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today, both personally and as an artist.
My creative life has never followed a straight line, and I think I've finally reached a point where I appreciate that rather than trying to make sense of it.
I spent more than fifteen years as a photographer, much of that time immersed in music and culture. I photographed musicians, toured, traveled constantly, spent years around remarkable creative people, and had experiences I never could have imagined when I first picked up a camera. Photography gave me an extraordinary life, but more importantly, it taught me how to pay attention.
Eventually, I realized I wanted something different creatively. After spending so many years documenting other people's creative lives, I wanted to find out what would happen if I turned that same attention inward and began making something that came entirely from me.
Painting required me to become a beginner again, which was both terrifying and incredibly liberating. I had spent years knowing exactly what I was doing with a camera. Suddenly I was standing in front of a canvas without those answers. That uncertainty changed me.
Personally, I think I'm much more comfortable today with the idea that we are allowed to evolve. We don't have to remain the person we were ten or twenty years ago simply because we've become good at being that person. There is enormous value in starting over, being curious again, and allowing yourself to move toward something you don't completely understand yet.
That's where I am now. I'm painting, I'm learning, I'm building, and I feel like I'm still at the beginning of something.
Transmission, mixed media on canvas, 48x60 inches
-You spent years photographing musicians and life on the road before you started painting. What made shifting to abstraction feel like the right move, instead of sticking with photography or something more representational?
Photography taught me to observe the world. Painting gave me permission to respond to it. That distinction became really important to me.
With photography, there is always something in front of the camera. No matter how interpretive the photograph becomes, you're beginning with something that exists in the physical world. When I started painting, I realized I wasn't interested in recreating something the eye could already recognize. I was much more interested in what experiences leave behind.
Memory. Atmosphere. Rhythm. Energy. A place you haven't visited in twenty years but can still somehow feel. A piece of music that immediately takes you somewhere. Those things are incredibly real, but they don't necessarily have a recognizable shape. Abstraction felt like the most honest language for exploring that.
It also gives the viewer freedom. I don't want to tell someone exactly what they're looking at or what they're supposed to feel. I want to create enough atmosphere and presence that they begin bringing their own memories and experiences into the work. That's where the painting becomes much more interesting to me.
Untitled, mixed media on canvas, 48x60 inches
-Scale is a big part of how you work, and you've said you want the work experienced physically as well as visually. When you're working that large, how does it change the way you think about gesture, texture, and composition?
At that scale, you're not really working from one position anymore. You're moving constantly.
I'll make a mark from a few inches away, walk ten feet backward, realize it completely changed the balance of the painting, move across the room, come back in close, and see something entirely different. The painting becomes almost architectural in that sense. You're not simply making an image. You're dealing with a physical space.
Gesture becomes more bodily. Texture becomes more important because I want the painting to reward someone from different distances. From across the room, the composition and atmosphere need to hold together. Up close, I want an entirely different world to reveal itself through layers, marks, scratches, drips, material, and things that might have been almost invisible from farther away.
And because the canvas is large, every decision has consequences somewhere else. You can't just solve one little section independently. Change something on the left side and suddenly something on the right doesn't work anymore. That's part of what I love about it.
Large paintings don't reveal themselves all at once, either to me while I'm making them or to someone standing in front of them. You have to move around them. You have to spend some time with them.
Between Frequencies, mixed media on canvas, 48x60 inches
-You seem to protect imperfection in your process rather than fix it. What draws you to leaving something unresolved instead of correcting it?
I don't really think of imperfection as something that automatically needs correcting.
Sometimes the awkward mark, the drip that went somewhere unexpected, the scratched-out passage or the piece of an earlier layer that almost disappeared carries more life than the thing I could intentionally put in its place. Those moments are evidence that the painting actually lived through something.
My paintings are heavily revised. Things get added, removed, covered, scraped back, and reconsidered constantly. I have no problem correcting something when the painting needs it. But I've learned to be careful about correcting the life out of it. There is also an important difference between unresolved and unfinished.
A painting can be completely resolved and still contain tension, contradiction, roughness or mystery. In fact, I usually want some of that to remain. If I explain every relationship and perfect every surface, there's nothing left for the viewer to discover.
I want the painting to hold together, but I don't want it completely closed.
I think some of the most interesting things in art happen in that little bit of space where something refuses to fully explain itself.
Residual Memory, mixed media on canvas, 48x60 inches
-What's the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
ChristopherDurst.com is the best place to see the paintings and spend some time with the work. I've also built a pretty extensive library of essays there for anyone interested in the ideas, experiences, and creative philosophy surrounding the paintings.
And support doesn't necessarily have to mean buying a painting. Look at the work. Share an artist you believe in. Talk about art. Visit galleries. Introduce artists to people who should know their work. Those things matter enormously.
Of course, if someone connects with one of my paintings and wants to live with it, I'm not going to discourage that either.
Collectors, curators, designers, galleries, and anyone interested in exhibitions, commissions, or collaborations can also reach me directly through my website.
Mostly, I just want people to spend time with the work. Everything else begins there.
Statement
Some of the experiences that shape us most deeply cannot be explained through words alone.
My paintings explore those experiences through abstraction, drawing on memory, atmosphere, rhythm, and the emotional traces that remain long after a moment has passed. I am less interested in describing the world than exploring what it leaves behind. I hope the work invites reflection rather than conclusions, allowing each viewer to bring their own experiences into the conversation.
Before painting, I spent years photographing musicians, artists, and life on the road. Photography taught me to pay attention—not only to the obvious subject, but to everything surrounding it: the atmosphere of a room, the character of a place, and the quiet moments that often reveal the most. What I once explored through a camera, I now explore through paint.
Scale is central to my practice. I paint large because I want the work to be experienced physically as well as visually. Through layers, texture, gesture, and revision, each painting reveals itself gradually over time. My paintings are not intended to provide answers. They are an invitation to slow down, look closely, and discover something that cannot be explained, only experienced.
Fragments of a Future, mixed media on canvas, 48x60 inches
Bio
Signal & Noise, mixed media on canvas, 60x48 inches
I am an abstract artist based in Austin, Texas.
Before turning my focus to painting, I spent more than a decade documenting music, culture, and life on the road as a photographer. My work took me behind the scenes of concerts, festivals, tours, and cultural events throughout the United States and Europe, providing a unique perspective on contemporary music and creative communities.
In 2026, I shifted my creative practice toward large-scale abstract painting. Working primarily in mixed media on canvas, I create large-scale works that explore surface, texture, and scale through an intuitive and evolving process.
I live and work in Austin, Texas.